the beast let loose on the granite cobblestone when he was done with his desecration. It all came back. Everyone who had ever angered or abused him. The brats who had sabotaged his shrine to his sister, the pig who had tortured his beloved Hattie. He would repay all the evil debts, and he slashed down through the air with the cane, slicing across the filthy long johns with a fiendish sense of release and power. Again and again he struck, as the creature before him howled and squirmed. The force he felt in his little arm was like unto the wave of energy that had radiated through him from the Eye. His sense of time and the street scene around him blurred. There was just the thrashing joy of his vengeance, intoxicating him like a drug. Where before he had always had to outsmart his enemies—or use the Eye—to unleash some demonic force that had amazed him as much as his victims, here he was enjoying the animal truth of physical aggression and he gorged on it, whaling on the vulnerable idiot without mercy. He did not hear the call of Fanny Ockleman or his mother. He did not hear the thunder rumbling like a hundred laden wagons. He did not hear the cries of Joshua Breed, who had soiled his underwear at the second shot and was now bleeding across his exposed buttocks.
It was not the rain that came in bullet-size drops which finally awakened him again to himself and his actions. Nor was it that he had felt himself becoming erect upon raising the cane the second time—the blood-hot thrill of revenge firing through his whole body, seeking outlet in his loins, while the whine of the sturdy strand and the sharp bite on the exposed ass was the ultimate sign of surrender and an invitation to torture. No.
It was something else. Something other.
They appeared on the periphery of his vision, standing in a line in the street, which no one else seemed to take any notice of. He in fact did not notice them visually at first at all. He was animally aware of them before sighting them. Even then, he did not feel that he saw them, but more that they allowed him to become aware of them where others were not.
There were six women—or so he thought—all dressed in pristine white ruffled dresses. They were as clear as anything could be, and yet somehow seemed veiled, remote. At first, he would have said they reminded him of Mother Tongue. But their dresses were stark and formal, and seemed not to be worn by them, exactly, but more by parts of them—as if they were inside some sort of armor, wedded to it the way St. Ives was joined with his hand.
Beyond the inexplicable cleanliness of their attire, given the environment, there was about them a summoning grimness that called to mind the gossiping biddies who had so plagued his and the family’s life back in Zanesville—the sharp-tongued shrews who hid behind hoopskirts, complaining shawls, and what passed for women’s stovepipe hats in those days, matronly old skullcaps tied with ribbons under the chin, only frilly and without color. The instant he was conscious of them, they filled him with a new kind of malice and unease. Abhorrence. Aversion.
No ensemble could have been less intimidating at a glance, not relative to the night thugs he had faced off against with the Eye. But that was not what his instinct told him. It screamed out to him a very contrary message.
These were ones who did not fear the Eye. These were one.
They stood not just in a line but in a plane of vision, or at least perception. There was a dimensionality to them that both seeped forward toward him and receded backward, making it seem that the very depth of field of reality—the essential fabric and framework of the street—had been fundamentally altered.
The second he thought that—as he looked closer—he saw to his unspeakable and unreasonable, shrinking apprehension that they all had the exact same face. It was not a mask, in any sense of abstraction or caricature, but it was not eccentric, individual, and animate, either. It was a face like none he had seen before, even on the nags of Zanesville—repeated, separate yet combined. Blurred. Merged.
Yes, that was what the impression was like. Six figures sharing a single face, so that it was impossible to determine if there were six figures or one.